20.10.11

The premise of the film is that the Predators have collected some of Earth's most dangerous humans to hunt on a gaming preserve that they've set up, possible on one of Saturn's moons (it's never entirely clear). The prey includes a mercenary, a mob hitman, a yakuza hitman, a vicious rapist/murderer sprung from death row, and Topher Grace. Who turns out, unsurprisingly, to be a serial killer.

This raises two important questions. 1: How did the Predators know that Topher Grace was a serial killer? It's not like they got him out of prison like the other guy - the predators seem to have been the ones to capture Topher Grace. Everything we know about the Predator culture suggests a total lack of interest on their part in human life. If they find a human who looks strong and has a gun, they'll shoot him. If he's got a knife, they'll fight him. That's about the end of their interest, it seems.

2: Even if they somehow knew that Topher Grace was a serial killer, why would they bring him to the hunting planet? While he's certainly threatening to the other members of the team, he's of no threat to the Predators, and as such, wouldn't make much of a trophy.

Let's say you wanted to hunt nature's most dangerous killer, the King Cobra. You gather a bunch of them together and place them in a concrete maze where you plan to track them down. Then, before starting the chase, you toss a mongoose into the maze as well. The mongoose isn't a threat to you, he's just a threat to the snakes. So why did you toss him into the mix?

Why did the Predators add Topher?

2 - No part of this ending makes sense.

While two Predators fistfight in a camp, Adrian Brody's preposterous torso runs for the evil(er) Predator's ship.

He gets there, climbs inside, and somehow manages to get it to take off within roughly one minute. For the record, one day ago this man didn't know Predators were real, and he's spent the ensuing day since that discovery running away from said Predators at full speed. Yet Adrien Brody's preposterous torso is flying the ship just sixty seconds after getting inside.

Having executed the slightly less evil predator, the evil(er) predator runs after his ship. Pissed that Adrien Brody's preposterous torso has stolen his ship, the evil(er) predator does this:

Two button presses. That's how much effort it took to blow up his own ship. No warnings, no countdowns, no 'Are you absolutely sure you want to blow up your (presumably quite expensive) spaceship?' messages?' Couldn't that have happened if he'd just fallen on some rocks or something?

More importantly, it turns out that Adrien Brody's preposterous torso wasn't in the ship when it exploded - which leads to two more points.

1: Adrien Brody's preposterous torso managed to learn not just how to operate a spaceship, but also its autopilot, in just a matter of minutes.
2: When faced with the realization that Adrien Brody's preposterous torso had stolen his (presumably quite expensive) spaceship, the evil(er) predator's first reaction was not to use the remote autopilot to bring the spaceship back down to him, but rather to blow it up, thereby stranding him on the planet for an unknown amount of time.

Oh, Predators - you're an insult to the brand name. And that's a brand name which included AVP2: Requiem.